I downvoted all of his posts in that thread for two reasons:
1.) The point he started in that thread regarding personal/private information was totaly unneccessary. As an online community, whatever we learn from each other should be straight from that person's mouth when it comes to that type of information. It would have been totally different in my mind if someone was posting saying Abigail had won some perl award, wrote some life altering algorithm or such. But to bring up a potentially sensitive subject about someone is for lack of a better word rude. I don't think people would do it any place but online.
2.) Perhaps if sierrathedog04 would have just let the issue die, rather than propagating its snowballing effect we may not have lost Abigail as a member of the community. To me it appeared that sick the way sierrathedog04 kept fighting to get the last node in.
Until that node, I never thought the Larry Wall quote I use as a signature was anything more than a joke, but now I see it as a reality.

"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol." -- Larry
Wall

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other